OUR SERVICE AREA
DM. Digital serves businesses across the USA and is open 24/7 for SEO in the USA. We handle Google Business Profile, Local SEO, Website Design, Content Strategy, Analytics & Performance and AI Visibility, measured by the calls and forms they bring in.
Let's get you more clients
Get your free SEO audit. We'll help you get more leads, visibility, and clients for your local business.
Want More Customers? Get a Free SEO Audit
Tell us about your business and we'll send a clear action plan.
Get Your Free SEO Audit
Tell us about your business and we'll send a clear action plan.
Short answer: internal linking means connecting the pages of your own website with ordinary links, so visitors and search engines can find every page and understand how your services, locations and articles relate. For a local business, it is one of the few SEO levers you fully control. Google's link guidance says "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site," and Google's John Mueller has called internal linking "super critical for SEO." A good local structure links the homepage to each service, each service to its related services and the areas you serve, each location page back to the services offered there and each article to the service it supports, using short, descriptive anchor text such as "drain cleaning" rather than "click here." This guide explains what Google says, what the data shows, how to structure a local site, how to write anchor text, how to find orphan pages and broken links, the technical mistakes that stop links from counting and a plan you can follow.
An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on the same website. Your menu is made of internal links. So is the "Learn more about water heater repair" link in a paragraph on your plumbing page, and the "Areas we serve" list in your footer.
Internal links do three jobs at once:
External links, from other websites to yours, also matter, but you have to earn them. Internal links are entirely in your hands. That makes them one of the most reliable improvements a local business can make, especially on a site that has grown page by page without a plan.
Local business websites often grow in bursts: a few service pages at launch, some city pages a year later, a handful of blog posts when someone had time. Each addition gets added to a menu or not at all. The result is common: pages that exist but are poorly connected, location pages nobody can reach except through the sitemap, and blog posts that never link to the services they discuss. Fixing those connections often helps more than writing new pages.
Get Your Free SEO Audit
Tell us about your business and we'll send a clear action plan.
Google has published clear guidance on links, and it is more practical than most SEO advice.
Google's link best practices say Google can generally only crawl a link if it is an HTML <a> element with an href attribute. Links built from a <span> with a click handler, or buttons that send people somewhere only through a script, may not be followed. If your site builder uses fancy buttons for key navigation, it is worth checking that they are real links underneath.
The same guidance says, "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site." A sitemap helps Google discover URLs, but it is not a substitute for links from your actual pages. A location page listed only in the sitemap and linked from nowhere is a weak page.
Google says "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on," and lists "Click here" and "Read more" as too generic. It also warns against overdoing it: "resist the urge to cram every keyword that's related to the page that you're linking to," and "If it feels like you're forcing keywords into the anchor text, then it's probably too much."
Google states, "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain." It also advises against chaining many links right next to each other, because readers struggle to tell them apart.
In a 2022 Search Central hangout, reported by Search Engine Journal, John Mueller said "internal linking is super critical for SEO" and described it as "one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors." Asked whether breadcrumb markup could replace it, he said, "I wouldn't see that as a replacement for normal internal linking." He did not describe internal links as a direct ranking factor; he described them as the way a site shows Google which pages are important.
Independent research on internal links is limited, but one large study is worth knowing. Zyppy's analysis of 23 million internal links across 1,800 websites and about 520,000 URLs, using Google Search Console click data, found:
The author calls it "mostly a correlation study," so it does not prove that adding links causes traffic. Popular pages naturally attract more links. But the pattern supports Google's guidance: important pages should be well linked, contextual links with descriptive and varied anchors are valuable, and stuffing every page into a sitewide menu is not the same as building a thoughtful structure.
Most local service websites, whether they have 15 pages or 150, are built from the same types of pages. Internal linking is easier when you think of them as layers.
A healthy structure lets a visitor or crawler reach any important page within about three clicks from the homepage, and makes the relationships between pages obvious. A plumbing article links to the plumbing service it discusses. A city page links to the services offered in that city. Every page links to a way to contact you.
For guidance on which pages a local site needs in the first place, see our guide to how many pages a local business website needs.
The simplest reliable structure for services is a hub with spokes. If you offer several related services, a hub page groups them and links to each one, and each service page links back to the hub and across to its closest relatives.
For an HVAC company, it might look like this:
Do not link every service to every other service. Link where a customer reading one page would genuinely want the other. A furnace repair reader may want furnace installation; they probably do not need your water heater flushing page.
Small businesses with only a handful of services may not need hub pages at all. The homepage and a services overview page can do the same job. Add hubs when you have enough services in a category that a summary page is genuinely useful to customers.
Location pages are where many local sites go wrong, in two opposite ways: either nobody can reach them, or every possible service and city combination gets its own thin page, all linked together in a giant grid.
Every location page should be linked from at least one prominent place: an "Areas we serve" page that lists and links to each one, the footer or a service area section on the homepage. Each service page can mention the main areas you serve and link to those location pages in a sentence such as "We provide drain cleaning throughout Tulsa, Broken Arrow and Owasso."
Each location page should link to the services you actually offer in that area, ideally with a sentence of local context rather than a bare list. "Many older homes in Broken Arrow still have galvanized pipes, so we handle a lot of repiping there" is more useful than a list of twelve services.
Creating a separate page for every service in every city, such as "drain cleaning in Owasso," "drain cleaning in Jenks" and so on, quickly produces hundreds of near-identical pages. Google's spam policies describe doorway pages as pages created to rank for similar searches that lead users to essentially the same content, and list multiple city pages that funnel users to one page as an example. A few genuinely different service and city pages, where you have real local detail, can make sense. A grid generated from a template does not, and linking hundreds of them together does not make them better.
A location page can link to neighboring areas you serve, such as "We also serve nearby Bixby and Jenks," which helps visitors who live on the border. Keep it to genuinely adjacent areas.
Ready to Grow Your Local Business?
DM. Digital helps local service businesses dominate Google with custom-built websites.
Your main menu should link to the pages most customers need: services or service hubs, areas served, about, reviews and contact. Dropdowns can list individual services if there are not too many. Avoid stuffing dozens of links into the menu; the Zyppy data suggests very large sitewide link sets are associated with weaker results on small and medium sites, and they make menus hard to use on a phone.
The footer is a good place for your name, address, phone, hours, key services, a link to your areas served page and trust links such as licensing and privacy. It is not a good place to dump every location and service page in tiny text. If your footer has 80 links, most visitors ignore it, and it adds little.
Breadcrumbs are the small trail at the top of a page, such as Home > Heating > Furnace Repair. They help visitors understand where they are and give every page a link back up the structure. Google supports breadcrumb structured data, although it stopped showing breadcrumbs in mobile search results in January 2025. Visible breadcrumb links remain useful on the page itself, but as Mueller noted, they do not replace normal contextual links.
Contextual links are links inside the body text of a page, surrounded by words that explain why the reader might want to click. They are usually the most useful links for both people and search engines, because the surrounding text tells everyone what the linked page is about and why it matters here.
Compare these:
The second link gives the reader a reason to click, tells Google exactly what the linked page covers, and connects two related topics. When you write or update a page, ask: where would a reader naturally want to go next? Put a link there.
Anchor text is the clickable words in a link. It is one of the clearest signals you can give about what a page covers, and one of the easiest to overdo.
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
| Click here to learn about our services. | See our drain cleaning service for clogs that keep coming back. |
| Best Tulsa plumber emergency plumbing near me | We offer 24-hour emergency plumbing across Tulsa. |
| Read more | Read our guide on when to replace a water heater. |
| Locations | We serve Broken Arrow, Owasso and Jenks. |
The better versions help readers decide whether to click and tell Google what each page is about, without forcing keywords.
Many local businesses publish helpful articles, such as "Why does my furnace keep turning off?" or "How much does a new roof cost?", and then never connect them to the services that solve those problems. That wastes the article's value.
An article about furnace short cycling should link to furnace repair. An article about roof costs should link to roof replacement and to your estimate request page. Place the link where it is genuinely useful, often after explaining when a problem needs a professional, and again near the end.
Links should run both ways where it helps. A water heater replacement page can link to a guide on tank versus tankless heaters for customers who want to compare. This keeps the reader moving toward a decision without leaving your site.
If you have several articles on a topic, such as five articles about heating problems, link them to each other where relevant and to the heating hub. This forms a topic cluster that makes your expertise on that subject easier to see. A small business does not need a large blog; a handful of genuinely useful articles, well linked to services, often does more than dozens of thin posts.
If an article targets the same search as a service page, such as an article titled "Drain Cleaning in Tulsa" next to your drain cleaning service page, they compete. Give articles question-style or informational topics, and link them to the service page that should rank for the hiring search.
Pages that build trust are often dead ends. A reviews page full of praise for your furnace work should link to furnace repair. An about page that mentions your master electrician should link to the services that need one. A licensing page can link to the services where licenses matter most.
Conversion matters too. Every service, location and article page should link clearly to contact or estimate request, usually in the header and again within or after the content. These are internal links as well, and they are the ones that turn visitors into calls.
Google says there is no ideal number, and that is the honest answer. Useful rules of thumb:
The Zyppy data showed clicks rising with internal links up to roughly 40 to 45 and declining beyond about 45 to 50, mostly due to navigation links. That is a correlation, not a target. For most local service pages, a lean menu, a sensible footer and a handful of contextual links in the body is plenty.
An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it. It may still exist in your sitemap or be reachable by a direct URL, but visitors cannot find it by browsing and search engines get little signal that it matters. Local sites accumulate orphans when old menus are replaced, city pages are added in bulk or blog posts are published without being linked anywhere.
Google Search Console's Links report lets you "See which of your pages is linked the most from within your own site." Click a page to see which of your pages link to it. Compare the top internal linked pages with your most important services. The report is a sample rather than a complete list, but it quickly shows whether your priorities match your structure.
Your sitemap lists the pages you want indexed. If a page appears in the sitemap but has no internal links, it is an orphan. A site crawler, which follows links the way a search engine does, can show which sitemap pages it never reached. Many crawler tools offer free versions suitable for small local sites.
Search Console's Page indexing report shows pages Google has discovered but not indexed. Poorly linked pages often appear as "Discovered, currently not indexed" or "Crawled, currently not indexed." Better internal links are one of the first things to check, along with whether the page is genuinely useful and different from your other pages.
Ask how many clicks it takes to reach each important page from the homepage. If a key service page is four or five clicks deep, behind a hub, a sub-hub and a filter, bring it closer with links from the homepage, related services or popular articles.
Ready to Grow Your Local Business?
DM. Digital helps local service businesses dominate Google with custom-built websites.
Some internal links look fine to visitors but do little for search engines. These are the common ones on local sites.
<a href>, may not be followed. Google renders JavaScript, as its JavaScript SEO basics explain, but its link guidance still asks for standard anchor elements, and many AI crawlers read only the raw HTML.Owners sometimes worry that adding many pages or links will exhaust Google's crawl budget. Google's crawl budget guide is written for very large sites, such as those with a million or more pages. A local business site with 20 or 200 pages is not in that category. The real concerns for small sites are quality, clarity and broken paths, not crawl budget.
AI search tools discover and read pages in much the same way search engines do: they follow links, read sitemaps and fetch pages. Microsoft's Bing team has said sitemaps help keep content discoverable in AI-powered search. A clear link structure helps in two ways:
Some AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so links built only with scripts may be invisible to them. Plain HTML links in the page are the safest choice. If you want to check whether AI crawlers can reach your site at all, our guide to robots.txt, llms.txt and AI crawlers explains what to look for.
Internal links also help AI tools choose the right page. A Yext study found that for questions naming a specific service, most AI citations went to the matching service page. If your service pages are well linked and clearly labeled, there is less chance an AI tool cites a vague homepage or an unrelated article instead.
A redesign is the most common time for internal linking to break. Menus change, URLs change and pages are merged or removed. A few steps prevent most problems:
Our guide to switching websites without losing Google rankings covers the full process.
Here is how this might look for an illustrative heating and cooling company in Tulsa with 45 pages: 12 service pages, 8 city pages, 20 blog posts and 5 trust and contact pages. The details are an example, not a real business.
Before: the main menu links to "Services," which is a single page listing all 12 services in a paragraph with no links. The city pages are linked only from the sitemap. Blog posts link to each other through "recent posts" widgets but never to services. The reviews page has no links at all.
After:
Nothing new was written. The pages were simply connected the way a customer would expect. Results depend on competition and content quality, and no change guarantees rankings, but a structure like this gives every page a fair chance to be found, understood and chosen.
Write down your most valuable pages, usually your top services and main locations. These should be the most strongly linked pages on the site.
Use the Search Console Links report or a crawler to see how many internal links each important page has and from where. Note any with only a menu link or none at all.
Crawl the site, compare the results with your sitemap and fix any orphan pages, broken links or links to redirected URLs.
For each service, list its closest related services, the areas where you offer it and the articles that discuss it. These become your contextual links.
Edit each page to add links where a reader would naturally want them, with short, descriptive and varied anchor text.
Keep the menu focused on what customers need and trim footers that list everything.
Link every article to its service and every trust page to relevant services and contact.
Recrawl, confirm fixes and check Search Console indexing over the next few weeks. Repeat the audit after any redesign and at least once a year.
Most internal linking problems start when a new page is published and forgotten. Adopt a simple habit: every new page gets at least three internal links pointing to it on the day it goes live, and links out to at least one related service and a contact page.
This takes ten minutes per page and prevents most orphans from ever existing.
Ready to Grow Your Local Business?
DM. Digital helps local service businesses dominate Google with custom-built websites.
Sitemaps help discovery, but Google's guidance says every important page should be linked from at least one other page. A sitemap does not show visitors or search engines how pages relate.
Links help when they are relevant. Sitewide link dumps and stuffed paragraphs make pages harder to use and, according to the Zyppy data, are associated with weaker results at very high counts.
Descriptive anchors help, but identical keyword anchors on every link look mechanical. Variety and natural wording are safer and, in the Zyppy study, associated with more clicks.
They are not a trick. They help Google find pages and understand which ones matter. Pages still need to be genuinely useful to rank.
John Mueller said directly that he would not see breadcrumbs as a replacement for normal internal linking.
Businesses with two or more staffed locations, such as a dental group with three offices or a contractor with branches in neighboring cities, need one extra layer. Each real office usually deserves its own location page with that office's address, phone, hours, team and directions, matching its own Google Business Profile.
The goal is the same as for a single location: every page reachable, every relationship clear and no near-duplicate pages linked together just to fill a grid.
Internal linking improvements usually show up gradually as Google recrawls pages. Record a baseline before you start, then check again after four to eight weeks:
Change one thing at a time where you can, and remember that seasonality, competitors and algorithm updates also move numbers. Look for trends over months rather than reacting to a single week.
Internal linking supports everything else on your site, but it does not replace the fundamentals. Your map pack visibility rests mainly on your Google Business Profile, relevance, distance and prominence. Your website's organic visibility rests on useful pages, technical health and reputation across the web. Internal links make sure the useful pages you have can be found, understood and reached by customers. Think of them as the roads between buildings: they do not make a building better, but a great building nobody can reach does not get visitors.
For the broader list of local SEO priorities, see our local SEO checklist. For how to structure individual service pages so they deserve the links pointing to them, see our guide to service page architecture, written for electricians but useful for any trade.
When we audit a local business website, internal linking is one of the first things we check, because it is often the fastest fix with the least new writing. We map every page to its role, find orphans and broken paths, check that the most valuable services are the most linked, rewrite generic anchors, connect articles to the services they support and trim navigation that tries to do too much. When we build or rebuild a site, every service, location and article page is linked into the structure before it goes live, and links are updated whenever pages are added, merged or retired, so redirects and orphans do not pile up.
We do not promise that internal linking alone will move rankings. It is one part of a complete local SEO program that also covers the Business Profile, reviews, listings and content. But it is the part that makes the rest of the site work together.
Internal linking is the least glamorous part of local SEO and one of the most dependable. Google's own guidance is simple: use real HTML links, link every important page from at least one other page and write anchor text that describes the destination without stuffing keywords. Build your site in clear layers, connect services to related services and the areas you serve, link every article to the service it supports, keep menus and footers lean, fix orphans and broken links, and update links whenever pages change. Do that, and every page you have already written gets a fair chance to be found and chosen.
If you want your site's structure audited and its pages connected properly, contact DM. Digital. Dan will call you back, run an audit and send a proposal.
Last updated on
Why trust DM. Digital?
Founded in 2018, DM. Digital is an SEO Agency serving businesses across the USA. All content is reviewed by our licensed technicians.
Ready to Grow Your Local Business?
DM. Digital helps local service businesses dominate Google with custom-built websites.
The best electrician websites are built around services, not design. Here is how to structure the site, what every service page needs, how ad landing pages differ and which technical basics matter.
A website switch does not have to cost you rankings. Here is how to inventory what works, build a redirect map, protect content, launch safely, change domains or your Google Business Profile address and recover quickly.
